[mapserver-users] MrSID Support in Mapserver

[Vic Kelson]

Lowther, David W wrote:

>Howdy All,
>
>Just wondering if there was planned support for the MrSid imagery in
>upcoming releases.
>  
>
I looked into this once; we were in a booth right next to the folks from 
Lizard Tech earlier this year. The MrSID developer's kit has a low-low 
price of $25,000 <choke> and you need it to compile applications, which 
would be a MAJOR pain for mapserver folks since we often "roll our own". 
 I don't have $25,000 lying around...

Perhaps someone with connections could contact the Lizards and see if 
they would make some provision for a fine open-source product like 
Mapserver.  Just a notion: maybe the model that Lucent follows for their 
Linux modem driver would work -- a binary-only free (as in beer) library 
that includes an appropriate mapserver API? The only problem I can see 
is that clever folks might use the library to do  things other than 
mapserver, which would (appropriately) irritate the Lizard Tech folks.

Another strategy would be to make a "stub" MrSID application that 
extracts a GEOTIFF image given a bounding-box and drops it into a 
temporary directory, then mapserv would simply read the file. This would 
require a mapfile extension that provides a command to be executed prior 
to drawing a layer (Ooooooh, that isn't a bad idea even without the 
MrSID stuff. It would simplify some very powerful CGI extensions, 
because you could dynamically generate layers to be drawn while still 
making use of the mapserver HTML templates!). Easy to implement? Yes. A 
bit disgusting? Yes. Slow? Maybe (although this could be offset by the 
use of a temporary ramdisk in Linux). But it wouldn't require linking to 
the MrSID library, thus protecting Lizard Tech from unauthorized (ab)use 
of their library; it would also protect mapserver from changes to the 
LizardTech library.  Furthermore, if the MrSID developer's kit can 
produce royalty-free applications, any kindly benefactor in the 
mapserver community who already has the developer's kit could implement 
it and distribute binaries...

My two cents.
Vic